Milford

December 28th 2014 would have been my Grandfather's 91st Birthday. When I was younger we would often make the trip to visit them on his Birthday, just after Christmas - usually in awful weather!

This year we decided to make the trip again for his Birthday, despite the cold weather and without the prospect of the amazing meals my Nana would have cooked us in the past, and of course their wonderful company.

They will never be forgotten and I cannot thank them enough for choosing such a beautiful location to make their home, somewhere we enjoy visiting and will continue to do so for hopefully many years to come.



Sunset looking out from the beach at Milford, by the time I'd added my ND filter to get a long exposure it was a little late - but still reasonably effective...



Harry seemed to enjoy the beach...

Family

It's been a while since I posted anything - here are a couple of shots from the weekend. I was actually helping my sister with a photography assignment she had, but being a bit of a control freak I of course managed to snatch my camera back and grab a couple of my own shots. As ever, my Niece and Nephew made for some good subject matter :)



Playing with some bubbles and their dog Jasmine, I like the open space in the shot - thankfully the lens helps to isolate my little subjects at f/2.2 :)



Staged, but effective!

Jules Bianchi

After the terrible accident at Suzuka today involving easily my favourite up and coming F1 driver, Jules Bianchi, I wanted to share a couple of photos I took of him in action at Silverstone last year. Not my best work, but hardly the point.

He's annihilated his team mate over the previous two seasons, part of the Ferrari Driver Academy he is more than deserving of a more competitive drive. I hope he gets the chance to do so.

Thinking of you Jules.

I recently visited Bath with a friend, both of us confidently limiting ourselves to a single lens. My choice for the day my Canon EF 17-40L, which I purposely selected to avoid resorting to macro.

My Lightroom 5 free trial ended recently, so until I cough up the £100 for a proper license I'm limited to un-edited images. Happily some of the images from the day didn't really need much, my favourite being this...

 
 

As you can see, I didn't do that well on the macro avoidance, albeit nowhere near 1:1. The lens isn't designed for macro, but the minimum focus distance is pretty low!

Bees

The bees seem to be enjoying the garden at the moment, they've worked through the lavender and have started on something else (I confess that even though this wasn't long planted, I have no idea what it's called!).

Great to see so much insect life in the garden, particularly bees. I'd just rigged up my flash gun after taking the photos below, only for it to start properly chucking it down with rain. A shame because I'd just spotted two more bees sleeping inside some nice purple flowers. Oh well!

Back to Colour

The crocosmia is flowering again in my garden, they're very pretty but I usually struggle to do something 'different' with them. I always find it tricky to shooting crocosmia anyway because most angles end with the sky as a background - which is often too bright. In this case it seems to have helped the photo, as did the small bug sat on the middle of the flower.

Poppit Sands, Pembrokeshire

I thought I'd return to some recent work that I felt was worthy or a re-process. Working on my old laptop was quite frustrating because of the limited screen size.

I wanted to re-edit this long exposure taken in Wales a few weeks ago. The ND filter left some colour cast ion the colour photo which I struggled to remove, but I also felt it would look better in monochrome.

I'm still a long way off what I would consider proficient in LightRoom 5, but I'm quite happy with the results on this one. I need to acquire a remote for my camera so that I can start using bulb exposure - 30 seconds isn't really long enough. Long exposure photography is another thing I'm some way off feeling proficient at!

Bee

This is my first blog post since converting to the dark side. I bought an iMac - the first reason being that for some time I've fancied one as they are (or at least were) considered better than a PC for photo editing, the second being the huge 27 inch screen.

So I downloaded Lightroom 5 (currently utilising the 30 day free trial) and this just happens to be the first shot I processed with it.

Definitely happier with the larger screen for image processing, and initially at least Lightroom 5 is a step up from the older version I had been using. As to weather a Mac is better, no idea - but it is a lot quicker.

I spotted this in my garden, I have no idea if lavender affects bees or not, but he didn't seem bothered at all by the macro lens I was pointing right in his face at about 10cm distance!

Slightly annoyed that I had to use ISO 800, but other than that I'm happy with the shot.


1/125th at f/8 ISO 800

Peacock

A recent trip to the Cotswold Wildlife Park with a friend who has just started getting in to photography was a good place to practice on a range of different subjects. Though I'm not a huge fan of these places thanks to most of the animals being out of their natural habitat, there were some which arguably were.

I mis-timed some 300mm lens use when we bumped in to a random peacock with his feathers fanned, but I'm still quite happy with the composition that resulted. 




A different composition of just the feathers.

Beaches

We spent a couple of days in Pembrokeshire last week, taking full advantage of some lovely weather.

The location was a great opportunity for me to try and progress with my landscape photography (not a strong point of mine).

I learn't a few new things about the lens and ND filter, though I still feel I have a long way to go before I'll be totally happy. Looking at other landscape photography, I also need to improve my post processing - though I always used to consider it cheating, I guess for certain things it's no different to professional prints from film.



For the rest of the shots, I felt that while the wide angle (17mm full frame) gave what I wanted in terms of the scope of the lanscape, I had a bit too much in the foreground/background, so decided to crop to a panoramic perspective.

A bit of yellow

The weather last weekend was lovely, I remain hopeful that isn't going to be it for us in the UK for the summer, but we'll see!

We enjoyed walks at the Ridgeway and Lydiard Park. The part of the Ridgeway we walked along allowed some very good views of the Wiltshire countryside. Lydiard was good for photographing buttercups...!

First, a single buttercup - in hindsight I should have used a smaller aperture, but I like how the background contrasts with the yellow - I don't think the background would have worked as well at ~f/8

Some more buttercups, shooting through a patch of them to get the effect of foreground and background blur.



A view from the Ridgeway near Hackpen Hill in Wiltshire. I like clouds in this, it looks like I could have done with standing closer to the fence - but working at 17mm I wasn't really that far away (a couple of feet or so).

100th Post

Apparently this is my 100th post on this blog - it's funny, I thought I'd posted around half that!

We went for a walk along the Ridgeway in Wiltshire on Saturday. I'd hoped to get some landscape shots but while the views were pretty good, my photos were not!

Making full use of the wide angle lens I had with me I did get quite a nice shot from the middle of a load of trees. There aren't many trees on the part of the Ridgeway we walked along (from Hackpen Hill), but there are three groups of them there. I believe the locals call them the 'three hedgehogs' as that's what they look like from a distance.

Pink Flowers

I bought a light (white?) box/tent so that I could try out some completely solid backgrounds. This is a first attempt using it, actually harder than I thought because light becomes a bigger issue. 

It's been processed a bit in Lightroom to bring out the pink and green a little more too. I'm not totally happy with the colour cast, though it appears my laptop needs some colour calibration as I was happy with how it looked on there, but it's more saturated when I look on other devices for some reason.




I also have blue, red and black background colours to try - not sure what on yet though!

Out and About

Two posts in one day...

Just a mix of things over the past couple of weeks.



Some bluebells growing in Lydiard Park - it's nice because you can't get in to where they grow (unless you're happy fighting barbed wire) so they haven't been walked over!


An (un-identified) butterfly sitting on a wall


A tree at Lydiard Park, I only had a 100mm lens with me which wasn't quite wide enough, but I still like it.


I was trying to get a shot of this hoverfly on the dandelion, but since it was doing it's best job to hover by it I got this instead - which I prefer!


Harry, the best dog ever. Fact!

Sophie & James - May 2014

It's been a while since I used my 50mm lens, which is strange since it's one of my favourites. My Niece and Nephew were (very) willing subjects again. Despite being in my Mum's garden, the lens allowed me to isolate them quite nicely from the distracting background.

I'm finding myself more and more frustrated by a) my lack of development in terms of my photography, and b) my ability to 'process' the image raw files as well as I'd like.

The first issue is pretty much tough-luck, I just need to make more effort to get out and use the camera, but the second one has me wanting a large screen iMac. To be honest my laptop just isn't cutting it for me, the screen isn't big enough and at times it's painfully slow. If only the one I want wasn't so expensive....

             

Spring

A couple more recent pics, both with the 135mm f/2 L - very pleased with this lens, which is frankly let down by my talent behind the camera.

James

More lens testing, this time the EF 135mm f/2 L

Nice weather on the Friday of this past bank holiday weekend, coupled with an ideal location (a lake behind the garden of my sisters now old house) and a very willing subject in my Nephew James.

I'd hoped to get some of my Niece too, but she was far less interested!

Contrast

Another photo from Barton-On-Sea this past weekend. I quite like the contrast of the bright sunlight on the sea against the dark rocks.

I'd really wanted to get some cloud movement, but with the sky almost completely clear (for once) I had to do without!

At 17mm the lens provides an incredibly wide view which is not given justice in this shot. I really look forward to using this lens and trying some other new things, like light trails.

Something new (for me)

So I thought I would try something different photography wise. For some time I've liked the idea of trying long exposures, something I attempted while on holiday in Wales a couple of years ago (and failing due to the amount of light). The first thing I needed was an ND filter to reduce light in to the camera (and therefore reduce the shutter speed). Second I wanted a higher quality lens capable of wide angles since the 24-105 f/4 L is weak in this area (to me at least).

I toyed with the idea of the Canon 16-35 f/2.8 L, but in the end decided to go for the 17-40 f/4 L since it was almost half the price, and at the apertures I intend to use very similar in performance, and better in some areas.

A trip to Milford-On-Sea and Barton-On-Sea this weekend provided the opportunity for me to try them both out. It's something quite new to me, but I'm pretty happy with my initial results.

Sadly Milford was a no go due to recent storm damage, they'd closed most of the beach. But with Barton just down the road I had some other options.

Winter Leaves

Some backlit leaves shot on a walk back in February. Really need to get out with the camera a bit more, my output of late has been pretty low.

I like this shot, using a lightroom filter to bring out the coldness of the day (it was very cold, albeit bright) .

Shot at f/1.4 to minimise depth of field, I think it creates a nice bokeh.